The Cell Phone Gospel

The most touching moment in Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey’s book on the mind-boggling spread of mobile phone technology in India comes in a quote from an email by one of the authors’ Delhi-based Australian informants, describing an impoverished laborer he’d encountered at the edge of an urban construction zone:

The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life

Assa Doron (Author), Robin Jeffrey (Author)

Harvard University Press

336 pages

$36.00

He had one of those large Samsung smart phones; it was so uncanny and out of place. There amongst the dust, pillars and rubble of a building site was this person, dressed very poorly, holding and obviously enjoying his smart phone. He was using one of its applications, but I’m not sure which.

Whenever a modern technology leaps the barriers and takes root in places that had never been kind to its precursors, things can seem uncanny indeed, at least to those on the outside. That’s part of why I’ve spent much of the decade enamored with news reports that fit into what I call “the gospel of cell phones in the developing world.”

And a lovely gospel it is, populated with characters ranging from Ghanaian election observers to Kenyan money-changers, from fisherfolk off the coast of India to Nigerian electronics traders in the back-alleys of Shenzhen, not to mention euphoniously named men and organizations like Mo Ibrahim, Carlos Slim, Ushahidi, and Hutchison Whampoa.

The story of the worker with his smartphone calls to mind Andy Warhol’s description of the populist possibilities of consumer culture: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” Indeed, my own cell phone, top-of-the-line as it is, is not that different from the device used by the laborer in Delhi or the cab driver in Kigali. And there’s a decent chance that the network my counterparts connect to is in some ways superior—likely cheaper and more flexible, possibly faster too—than my U.S. carrier. So advances the cell phone gospel—a tale of equalization and advancement, of the little parts of what one World Bank report describes as “the biggest ‘machine’ the world has ever seen” making things better, and faster, and now.

Over the past ten years the number of mobile phone subscribers in India has grown from a few hundred thousand to as many as 900 million—three subscriptions for every four Indians of any age. It’s an estimate that no doubt involves some double-counting, but it’s still a phenomenon with deep and significant cultural effects.

Doron and Jeffrey attempt to chart the pulse of these changes, looking at the history of long-distance communication in India and the ways person-to-person information has been controlled and consumed by both the élites and the masses. Gandhi, the great skeptic of industrialization, enjoyed talking on the telephone and made sure that the line in his ashram remained accessible to every resident. He saw the telephone as a way to reach out across distance and caste barriers. But for much of the 20th century, telephones were scarce in India; calls were expensive, and new lines took years to be installed. The subcontinental genius for bureaucracy spawned an entire how-to-get-your-phone industry whose crowning achievement was the 800-page Swamy’s Treatise on Telephone Rules—as good a candidate as any for the purposely ill-defined “Great Indian Phone Book” of Doron and Jeffrey’s title.

Starting in the mid 1990s, cell phone companies in India began to work their way into the market (and around the land-line regulations). When they did, handsets were first marketed to the rich, but once that market was saturated, service was opened up to Indians with lower incomes, using prepaid plans and airtime sold by village shops and neighborhood kiosks.

What happens when you put millions of cell phones into billions of hands? According to the cell phone gospel, it changes everything. New jobs are created, inefficiencies are slashed, the poor are empowered, and the powerful brought down to earth. Take the famous fisherfolk of Kerala, who discovered they could phone from offshore to find out which port would offer the best price for the day’s catch. Or the Ganges River boatmen profiled by the authors, who ferry clients from ghat to ghat in Benares, using the “known client” loophole to pick up callers from ghats nominally controlled by other boatmen. Or the speakers of the Gondi aboriginal language who can hear community news and report corruption through an elaborate voice mail tree. Or the unprecedented, mobile-communication-fueled alliance between high caste and dalit (formerly untouchable) parties that shook up elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Each anecdote is inspiring; many are TED talk-worthy, but unfortunately most gospel-of-cell-phones reportage leaves it at that. Thankfully, Doron and Jeffrey, while never quite losing their enthusiasm, are unafraid to complicate the narrative and, when possible, let their conclusions flow down from aggregated data rather than up from one or two anecdotes.

Even the most pronounced mass effects—as in Uttar Pradesh—can turn out to be one-offs. In a subsequent election, the former ruling party used a similar mobile strategy, muting the coalition’s advantage. The Gondi voicemail newspaper facilitated unprecedented, two-way sharing of information, benefitting a marginalized community. But, as the authors note, “Phones alone are powerless without responsible third parties willing to act.”

The Keralan fisherfolk, for their part, enjoyed improved profits and media stardom, but it wasn’t long before their buyers in disparate harbors also started communicating, via cell phones of their own, to keep prices more uniform. Though mobile connectivity made a certain subset of Keralan fishermen (those with larger, powered boats) a bit more efficient, it is unlikely, the authors report, that the new technology caused new Keralans to go down to the sea in ships.

Mobile phones in India have created millions of new jobs in one sector—the mobile phone industry, from poshly austere high-end stores selling international brands down to the repair-whiz mobile mistrii (artisan) resurrecting broken handsets in the bazaar. Technology, after all, first and best serves itself.

In India the cell phone’s effect has been at least as much social as economic, sometimes to the chagrin of its champions. Poor farmers given phones as a way to convey crop advice and weather reports also (and sometimes exclusively) loved them as a way to talk to their friends. For many Indians, the mobile phone largely strengthens and facilitates already existing networks of friends and family. But it also, the authors note, “enables connections and encounters that would previously have been impossible.” This can sound, especially to Western ears, like good news. But it can also turn out to be a decidedly mixed bag.

Increased, unregulated communication threatens traditional family structures, in particular challenging men’s ability to regulate the interactions of their wives, sisters, and daughters. This affects courtship rituals, for example—cell phones enable discreet and illicit conversation, whether for arranging one’s own “love match” or simply facilitating forbidden pre-wedding chats with one’s arranged husband-to-be. The authors quote Sarah Lamb’s studies on the dismantling and rebuilding of social networks following marriages in West Bengal, with new brides often expected to turn over their old cell-phone contact lists and to cleave, incommunicado, to their new families.

From there we take a downward slide to thoroughly illicit uses for cell phones: as vehicles for pornography, tools for fraud, or frightening plot-points in terrorist acts. During the horrific November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, gunmen rampaged through the heart of the city, taking directions from distant minders on their mobile phones, even as panicked citizens clung to their own mobiles, calling for help. The constant flow of information, shown on live television, in many cases provided guidance for the attackers as well as for first responders.

The cell phone gospel says, “This changes everything!” I enthusiastically agree, adding, as my only caveat, “Also, this changes nothing.” Ubiquitous global mobile telephony offers the promise to rearrange the human experience in unprecedented ways. Technological change has the power to disrupt, for good and ill, and the near-guarantee to ripple outwards in surprising ways. But people will still be people: as fallen and as redeemable as ever before.

Nate Barksdale edited two editions of the travel guide Let’s Go: India and Nepal. He lives in New York City and writes for the History Channel.